It is well known to all that parts of the project have been significantly rewritten.
The project is supported only by old and kind fans.
I think that the GPL license can alienate some new programmers.
They probably think so. Why should I develop the project, if all my efforts, innovations will be limited by the license of 2004.

We can replace other libraries and give them a new name with a different license.
It is even easier for us to rewrite the entire graphics engine from scratch than to try to improve the existing one.
Our individual libraries can be used in other projects.
And the game itself will also be an example of the use of these libraries.
There is another similar project - spring. https://springrts.com/
We can join forces.

I guess changing the license is out of question because the author company (who defined the license) is long gone. And if GPL could have been easily changed, it'd defeat its purpose.

I haven't heard a single complaint about GPL being too restrictive on these forums or trac so far, for many years. I'm not sure if there are more such people than people who would, on the contrary, prefer GPL over permissive licenses.

You are definitely allowed to make new libraries from scratch, which we may later link against. Obviously, licensing is not the hardest part of it.

I tried a few Spring-based games, but never managed to run them; in my personal experience, it seems to have more driver problems than we do, and i cannot say much else on this topic.

moltengear wrote:
I think that the GPL license can alienate some new programmers.
They probably think so. Why should I develop the project, if all my efforts, innovations will be limited by the license of 2004.

Wrong. While I'm not a contributor to Warzone (but springrts infra), I contribute only to strong copyleft projects.
Why would I develop a project if others cannot have the same freedoms as I had in studying and modifying the source code? Having a license such as MIT means that someone can take the code I've developed in my free time for the benefit of the whole of humanity and then incorporate it into some closed-source project that noone can study, let alone modify or freely distribute.
Before you call me a free software zealot, know that I am prepared to work under whatever license you choose if you pay me to do so.

moltengear wrote:
We can replace other libraries and give them a new name with a different license.
It is even easier for us to rewrite the entire graphics engine from scratch than to try to improve the existing one.
Our individual libraries can be used in other projects.
And the game itself will also be an example of the use of these libraries.
There is another similar project - spring. https://springrts.com/
We can join forces.

I'm of the opinion that SpringRTS is light-years ahead of Warzone2100 as an engine and spring lobby is light-years ahead of Warzone2100 infrastructure.
I also believe that the whole of Warzone2100 game logic could be implemented in around 2000 lines of Lua gadget code (excluding unit definitions, which is trivial code and I count as part of model import). The only major things missing are cutscene support and load/save. The later has some WIP code, while the former could also be implemented as part of campaign handling inside the lobby client.

NoQ wrote:
I tried a few Spring-based games, but never managed to run them; in my personal experience, it seems to have more driver problems than we do, and i cannot say much else on this topic.

Wrong. While I'm not a contributor to Warzone (but springrts infra), I contribute only to strong copyleft projects.
Why would I develop a project if others cannot have the same freedoms as I had in studying and modifying the source code? Having a license such as MIT means that someone can take the code I've developed in my free time for the benefit of the whole of humanity and then incorporate it into some closed-source project that noone can study, let alone modify or freely distribute.
Before you call me a free software zealot, know that I am prepared to work under whatever license you choose if you pay me to do so.

The release of software products with the MIT license does not mean its disappearance.
If you use a library with a GPL license, you can not create a commercial product. That's it such a library is difficult to use for a project. GPL license fits best for the final product.
Let's remember the story. In an era of tough confrontation with Microsoft, free software fans stole a lot of intellectual developments and ideas from proprietary software. Yes, the GPL protects authorship well, but later it was found that it is not very good for development. Then came more loyal licenses. And big companies are happy to use it.

It is also impossible to make a commercial release of the 2nd and 3rd parts of the game.
Otherwise, developers will not be interested. A very large amount of work.

ThinkSome wrote:
I'm of the opinion that SpringRTS is light-years ahead of Warzone2100 as an engine and spring lobby is light-years ahead of Warzone2100 infrastructure.

I don't doubt that, the rendering engine never got overhauled to bring it up to date for the most part, but, things are slowly changing on that front.
The in-game lobby is rudimentary, and can't be compared to a external project, so, yes, spring's lobby is more advanced by default.

I also believe that the whole of Warzone2100 game logic could be implemented in around 2000 lines of Lua gadget code (excluding unit definitions, which is trivial code and I count as part of model import). The only major things missing are cutscene support and load/save. The later has some WIP code, while the former could also be implemented as part of campaign handling inside the lobby client.

How did you come to that conclusion, and how does game logic fit into the LUA gadget code? Wouldn't the LUA gadget code only be used for the UI?
However, if you meant that the game logic itself could be implemented in LUA, and is only 2000 lines, then, you should be able to do that in a few days to a week.

I am sure once you have shown the viability of such a project, by having implemented what you have said, and people can have something to run, then more people can help you achieve your goal.